Comet Atomic
Author's posts
Jun 25 2025
Joseph Eichler: Modern Homes for Modern California
Born on June 25, 1900, in New York City, Joseph Eichler became one of the most influential homebuilders of mid-century America without ever training as an architect. Instead, he was a developer with an unusually strong belief that ordinary families should be able to live in genuinely modern, architect-designed houses. At a time when much …
Jun 17 2025
John Baldessari: Conceptual Art, Color Dots & Deadpan Humor
Born on June 17, 1931, in National City, California, John Baldessari spent more than half a century questioning almost every assumption people make about art. Did an artist have to personally paint a painting? Could a sentence be an artwork? Could an ordinary photograph become art simply because someone selected it? What happened if you …
Jun 16 2025
Jim Dine: Hearts, Tools & Personal Symbols
Born on June 16, 1935, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Jim Dine has spent more than six decades transforming ordinary objects into intensely personal art. Hearts, bathrobes, hammers, saws, paintbrushes, flowers, skulls, classical sculptures, and the wooden puppet Pinocchio have appeared repeatedly in his paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and sculptures. Rather than constantly searching for new subjects, …
Jun 15 2025
David Rose: Holiday for Strings, Television & The Stripper
Born on June 15, 1910, in London, David Rose became one of the most prolific composers, arrangers, conductors, and orchestra leaders of mid-century American entertainment. His career moved effortlessly from big-band radio and lush orchestral recordings to Hollywood films, variety television, Westerns, family dramas, and one of the most unexpectedly famous instrumental records of the …
May 30 2025
Fernando Amorsolo: Painting the Light of the Philippines
Born on May 30, 1892, in Paco, Manila, Fernando Amorsolo became one of the most recognizable painters in Philippine history. Golden rice fields, workers harvesting beneath tropical sunlight, women carrying baskets of fruit, village celebrations, quiet landscapes, and portraits illuminated by a warm glow became synonymous with his name. His extraordinary ability to capture light …
May 07 2025
Soviet Film Wednesday: The Ascent
Few war films are as physically harsh, morally unsettling, and spiritually charged as Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent. Completed in 1976 and released widely in 1977, the Soviet black-and-white drama follows two partisan fighters moving through the frozen countryside of Nazi-occupied Belarus during the Second World War. What begins as a dangerous search for food gradually …
Apr 30 2025
Soviet Film Wednesday: Enchanted Desna
Few films treat memory quite like Enchanted Desna. Directed by Yuliya Solntseva and released in 1964, the film moves through childhood recollection, rural Ukrainian life, war, imagination, and the natural world without trying to separate them neatly. Past and present overlap. Memories become dreams, landscapes seem almost mythological, and ordinary experiences take on the scale …
Apr 29 2025
Meshes of the Afternoon: Maya Deren’s Dreamlike Experimental Classic
A flower appears on an empty road. A woman climbs a staircase and enters a quiet house. A key changes into a knife. A mysterious hooded figure walks away with a mirror where its face should be. The same moments begin happening again, only slightly differently each time. In just fourteen minutes, Meshes of the …
Apr 27 2025
Theo Angelopoulos: History, Memory & the Poetry of Cinema
Few filmmakers made history feel as physical as Theo Angelopoulos. In his films, the past does not remain safely behind the characters. It drifts through misty landscapes, follows people across borders, interrupts journeys, reshapes families, and sometimes seems to occupy the same space as the present. Born in Athens on April 27, 1935, Angelopoulos became …
Apr 21 2025
Seattle Space Needle: The 1962 World’s Fair Icon That Defined the Future
Long before Seattle became internationally associated with coffee shops, grunge music, and technology companies, one extraordinary structure announced that the city intended to become part of the future. Rising 605 feet above Seattle, the Space Needle looks simultaneously like a tower, a rocket, and a flying saucer that has paused above the city. Its slender …
